Workshop raises more questions around timeline for Tri-Rail’s troubled Miami station
Don’t expect Tri-Rail trains to cruise through downtown Miami until late 2022.
After more than three hours of questioning by the governing board that oversees South Florida’s government-run rail system, Tri-Rail and Brightline officials alluded to their timeline to fixing the problems with a $70 million tax-funded extension that was originally supposed to start operating in 2017, corrections that would push the train’s arrival in Miami to late next year.
Several issues have recently come to light related to the extension to downtown Miami’s Brightline depot, including exposed rebar, an elevated ramp that may be too weak to handle Tri-Rail trains and a platform Brightline built that is too narrow in some parts to allow a Tri-Rail train to smoothly pass by.
Steven Abrams, a lawyer who has served as Tri-Rail’s director since 2018, said during the Wednesday workshop that the timeline over the next several months will involve meetings with Brightline, sonar testing to ensure stable concrete, updated train software and modified vehicles.
He apologized for a lack of communication to board members about the alleged defects at the Brightline station.
“It’s important to understand what got us to this point, but more importantly, what it will take to move forward,” he said.
Board wants answers
The governing board of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, the public agency that oversees Tri-Rail, is made up of appointees and local elected officials from Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Board members pressed Tri-Rail and Brightline offiicals for answers Wednesday about how the problems with the project took so long to come to light and why there has been little urgency to fix them.
Problems with the planned Tri-Rail station have been known since last spring but were only made public last week during a meeting of the Tri-Rail board.
“So whose fault was it?” J.C. de Ona, Miami-Dade citizen representative on the board, asked Wednesday.
Carlos Penin, an engineer and board member, asked “where are we going with this thing?”
“How do we fix it? And who is to blame?” he said. “I don’t want us to pay another penny if someone out there wasn’t doing their job.”
Penin asked why consultants and engineering firms from both Brightline and Tri-Rail waited to raise alarms until so late in process.
“It’s a clash of titans that we are seeing,” he said. “Both entities are paying for experts that somehow have brought us to this point.”
Board member Robert Sendler said it was “embarrassing” that the sense of urgency seemed to come after media reports of the problems.
Raquel Regalado, a Miami-Dade County Commissioner who sits as the board’s vice chair, chided Tri-Rail for being slow to fix the issues on the project, now delayed four years.
“We have missed a lot of opportunities to course correct,” she said. “There is a brain trust here a lot of Tri-Rail folks could have sought out and gotten a lot of help from.”
She called on Tri-Rail and Brightline officials to consult the Florida Department of Transportation as they go through the process of studying and fixing problems in the next several months. The department doesn’t have a financial stake in the project, which was funded in 2015 by Miami-Dade County government ($14 million), Miami ($7 million) and Miami’s Overtown redevelopment agency ($18 million).
Tri-Rail receives state, county and federal revenues, and paid $22 million for the improvements needed to use the existing Brightline tracks running to downtown.
Regalado, who has called for Abrams’ resignation, said the Miami-Dade inspector general is looking into the delays due to the amount of public money spent. A representative from the office watched the meeting Wednesday night.
“We need a sense of urgency,” Regalado said. “There was a failure to inform the board on the part of the executive director.”
January meeting
Regalado told the Miami Herald she hopes for a “real timeline” and some resolutions to the ramp load issue and modifications to the trains themselves by the time the SFRTA Governing Board meets again at the end of January.
“I think he’s a nice person, but he doesn’t have rail experience and part of the reason we are in this mess is because he doesn’t have the experience,” she said of Abrams, a former SFRTA board member. “It wasn’t delayed because of the pandemic. It was delayed because no one was minding the store.”
In 2015, Miami and Miami-Dade agreed to fund about $43 million of the $70 million cost for the second-story platform Brightline offered to build in its new Miami Central rail complex with the goal of bringing tax-funded Tri-Rail into the City of Miami.
The 2015 agreement calls on the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority to exercise “all responsibilities of the owner under the design and construction contract.” When Miami-Dade approved the funding, Abrams, then a sitting Palm Beach commissioner, was there to represent Tri-Rail as its chairman.
One issue that needs to be resolved is a disagreement between Tri-Rail, which says the ramp is too weak to handle trains, and Brightline, whose engineers say the ramp has the same load capacity as rail in several other major cities, and has operated without problems for years.
“In every component in everything we developed and built, we made sure what we have done was done properly and safely,” Mike Reininger, Brightline Trains CEO said during the workshop. “In the early stages, a highly respected global engineering firm developed the criteria ... for the design of all the structures.”
Abrams told board members Wednesday that the board also has to approve a contract for new train software during the January meeting, and that it will take five months to onboard the software. Then 90 days will be spent training engineers and staff. It will take another three to five months to conduct ultrasound tests on the concrete at the platform, and more time will also be spent making modifications to the trains so that they fit on the platform, he said.
“I don’t think we are going to resolve 100% of the problems by the January meeting,” Regalado said. “But I would at least like to have 70% and have the contractual pieces moving ... They have to talk it through and figure out what they are doing.”
Herald staff writer Douglas Hanks contributed to this report.
This story was originally published December 22, 2021 at 8:10 PM.